| It is helpful to be able to see the difficulties our parents had but it does not remove the lack of caring we felt at the time, and we need to feel justified in our disappointment and anger that we did not get what we needed. Our needs are not related to our parents’ ability to give. We need to accept the point we have reached in order to proceed. So, it is useful to consider the everyday words and actions of our upbringing - your parents may still be talking to you like that today, No wonder you’d sometimes rather not visit them. Things said to us many times throughout our upbringing are the basis for our beliefs about ourselves and our capabilities. They run like a tape in our heads: we hear them in our inner voices criticising and cajoling, we have absorbed their truths as our own, they form our reality, our yardstick to measure new experiences and because they are always there we do not question them. Once we see our parents as other humans with problems - and parents of their own, we can observe their coping mechanisms based on the ideas about the way best to live their lives given to them by their parents. It is sometimes illuminating to think about the conditions in our parents’ lives when we were conceived and very young babies - and their parents in turn because we can then see what was important then may not be so any longer. Their lives may have been ruled by the restrictions of wartime, or religions which do not presently affect us, but to understand them explains why our parents were the way they were. The next step is to see that they did the best they could in the circumstances, and then see that it may not have been what we needed. Then we can sense what we missed, how we felt and allow ourselves the natural grief and anger that we did not have our needs met, resulting in a low opinion of ourselves and the belief that they did not love us - of course they did, they were doing the best they knew how. Worry and fear really influence people’s ability to parent their children satisfactorily, even if the fear is coming from a belief within rather than an outside threat. When we are worried we fail to listen to what others need, a short term threat overrides the long term need of a child to receive adequate creative attention on a daily basis. Over a long period this damages the child’s ability to communicate his needs and belief that his opinion or presence in the world matters. A child knows when his presence in the world is welcome or just tolerated. The child who knows he was an accident feels intrusive and unwelcome. The child of parents who wished for a child of the opposite sex will go to extraordinary lengths to try to make up for his or her failure to be what parents wanted. As a child I was often called clumsy and I only recently realised that I am a very careful person compared with most people; but I was brought up in family of extremely careful people so I appeared clumsy to them. I noticed that 1 was suggesting that one of my children was messy and untidy, then a child from another family came to stay and despite her best endeavour was much messier than ALL of my children, and I realised the message to me. I know someone who comes from a quiet family and was always considered noisy and extroverted by them. She got pushed to take on roles in public which she was uncertain about because the label only worked within the family circle and in fact she feels under pressure because of their expectations of her. | |
